Young Reporters for the Environment (YRE) is hosted by the National Wildlife Federation; the program is coordinated by the Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE) worldwide. This year’s deadline for submission is March 15, 2014. The competition is open to students between the ages of 13 and 21.

“The action by the TCEQ Commissioners unnecessarily invites yet another round of contentious endangered species issues under federal law, said Tyson Broad, Research Associate with the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club. The upper reaches of the Brazos River watershed are the last remaining habitat for two fish species—the sharpnose shiner and the smalleye shiner—proposed for listing as endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “TCEQ had the opportunity to adopt rules that would have gone a long way toward protecting these two species, but unfortunately chose not to do so.”

NWF in the News

“The State Department analyzed a certain route in Nebraska and a judge has now thrown that route out,” said Jim Murphy, an attorney with the National Wildlife Federation, which opposes the pipeline. “I would think that a path to approval is very difficult.”

“In the United States alone, native bees contribute at least $3 billion a year to the farm economy,” Mace Vaughan, pollinator program director at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Ore., told the National Wildlife Federation in July. “We grossly overlook the critical role these animals play.”

The Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation recently sought an injunction to stop construction, but U.S. District Court Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson ruled against them, noting that the environmental groups failed to prove “irreparable harm” would result if construction proceeded while litigation to stop the pipeline continued.

The National Wildlife Federation is urging sportsmen to do their part to help slow down or reverse climate change, concluding in its latest report “Nowhere to Run: Big Game Wildlife in a Warming World” that many big-game species across North America are already being affected and could be headed for a big fall.

The National Wildlife Federation has noted that the Asian Carp pose a threat to the waters they inhabit and they want to begin efforts to mitigate their eventual presence in the Great Lakes region. They believe that the carp’s migration can be halted if the Mississippi River Basin waterways are separated from the Great Lakes.

“Senator Landrieu has proven herself to be a champion for restoration of the Mississippi River Delta, as well as an effective legislator, notably demonstrated by her leadership in crafting and passing the bipartisan Restore Act,” the groups said in a written statement.

A report released last year by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) confirmed that the gulf’s dolphins, sea turtles, and many fish including the Atlantic bluefins were in fact continuing to die in record numbers three years after the 2010 spill – which is considered the worst spill in petrochemical history.